67
“It was a hack.”
Clarissa almost wept with relief as the pressure inside her chest let go all at once. For the half hour since she called the Cyber Twins, she hadn’t dared to breathe.
She set her phone to speaker. Miranda’s team had rejoined the table, so everyone would hear her vindication at the same time.
“You’re on speaker. Please repeat that.”
“It was a hack, not an inside job.” Only then did Clarissa pay attention to the voice.
“Do we have a point of origin yet, Mr. President?” Clarissa prayed that it wasn’t inside her own organization.
“Jeremy is working on that with your people. He says—”
“We have some good leads,” Jeremy interrupted the President in his excitement. “Homeland Security brought on the NSA to trace Captain O’Dowd’s background and contacts, too. Harry and Heidi have, of course, already patched the security hole the hacker used. Or rather, made it look as if they hadn’t but left a trap if the hacker tries coming back in.”
“Captain O’Dowd?” Clarissa managed edgewise.
“He’s the missing pilot. The Air Force officer who stole that plane from Andrews and killed Senator Ramson. An alias, of course, or maybe a name change. He was a sleeper agent, you know. Anyway, we’re tracing an overseas contact that may have been his mission launch signal. It occurred within minutes of the hack on the Defender II’scommand stack to fire the laser. The command was sent when the satellite’s orbit passed over the Middle East. The timing’s right for thesameperson to do one task and then the other. And there’s a common footprint to the two channels. The NSA thinks that may be a coincidence but Heidi doesn’t.” He finally wound down.
“The footprint?” And Clarissa regretted it the moment she asked.
“Their digital footprint. Every coder at our level has a style, a set of mannerisms. A juxtaposition of habit and a collection of techniques to address different interface issues. She and Harry think the footprint is familiar, a freelancer known to work for the highest bidder. Right now they’re spoofing a contract with an embedded tracer. They’ll have him the moment he responds and they’ll call you, Director Reese, when they do. Then you can mobilize—”
“Thank you, Jeremy,” the President’s heavy voice rumbled over the phone.
“Oh right. We’ll let you know what we find. It could take a while, but the coding techniques to mask their signal definitely let us surmise a common point of origin. Uh…shutting up now.”
And he finally did.
“Oh, and if Miranda’s there, tell her I said,Hi!”Then he was finally quiet.
Clarissa looked down the table and saw that Miranda was smiling. Some kind of nerd code?
“Well,” Drake said slowly, “General Liú. It would appear that unless Chinese hackers were involved in this, we owe you an apology. We greatly appreciate your attendance here. I believe we are done.”
“Not quite, Drake,” the President spoke up.